


A Reckless Hallelujah

by sunsetmog



Category: BBC Radio 1 RPF, One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 23:30:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20366902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsetmog/pseuds/sunsetmog
Summary: You're too short to be a dancer, they'd said.Competition's really tough. You should have applied when you were 11. You can't commute to the Royal Ballet School from Doncaster, they'd said.Why would you even try?





	A Reckless Hallelujah

**Author's Note:**

> Look, my knowledge of ballet comes from ten passable years of mediocrity at the back of a ballet class growing up, endless re-reading of books like _A Dream of Sadlers Wells_ (still one of my favourite books ever, OH GOD what a dream of a book, and its glorious sequel(s)), owning the male Swan Lake on DVD, and very occasionally sitting in the cheap seats at the Royal Opera House. It does not come from any real source and therefore should be assumed to be entirely nonsensical on the subject of actual ballet training. 
> 
> Anyway! Big thank you to **Anitra** for reading this in Whatsapp as I wrote it and pasted it into messages for her, and for saying that I should share it. It turns out I didn't know I needed ballet dancer!Louis until I was writing ballet dancer!Louis, and then I couldn't stop.

_You're too short to be a dancer_, they'd said. _Competition's really tough. You should have applied when you were 11. You can't commute to the Royal Ballet School from Doncaster_, they'd said. _Why would you even try?_

Louis, fourteen years old and furious about it, had almost resigned himself to giving up, but in the end it was his mum who made him go to the audition for White Lodge.

"I think you're bloody brilliant," she'd said. "And I think we all know I'm expert enough to know what I'm talking about."

"You're a midwife," Louis had said, moodily pushing spaghetti hoops around his plate so that they covered every bit of his toast. 

"I'm your mum," she'd said, and he'd slumped lower in his seat and said _suppose_. 

He had, rather to the surprise of everyone, got in. 

~*~

His mates from home spent their free time talking about girls and going to the pub and not doing their homework, but Louis didn't have any free time. He practiced, and he practiced, and he did grand jetes and strength training and barre work and pairs work, and he missed a few meals here and there and got in fights with some of the others who thought they were better than him. 

"Try not to get angry," his mum said down the phone, when Louis ranted about this one guy, who drove him up the wall and was in the company and Louis wasn't and didn't Louis know it. "I know you've got my temper, but work at it. You're a brilliant dancer, Lou. You got there, didn't you? Be kind and keep working."

"He drives me mad, Mum. He's always just… there. Making fun."

"Ignore him," she said. "Just… ignore his useless face."

"His face is useless," Louis said. "It's so fucking useless."

"Language, Louis," his mum said mildly, but she didn't mind too much, he could tell. 

Anyway, Nick's face was fucking useless, so it wasn't even a lie. 

~*~

"Oi, shortarse," Nick said. "Move it up."

Louis, who was sat in the middle of the bench by the side of the practice room and could quite happily have moved six inches either way and created another spot for someone to sit down, glanced up at him, and then back down at his phone. He said nothing, but he said it loudly. He didn't move.

"I see how it is," Nick said. 

"Do you now," Louis said. "There are plenty of other places to sit."

"I wanted to sit in this one."

"Well, I'm here," Louis said. 

Nick looked at him. "I know," he said. "I can see you. Can't exactly miss you, can I?"

"If that's a comment about the size of my arse," Louis said without looking up, "you can fuck right off." His mates were all off at university, and Louis was getting called into a meeting with his dance teacher on a Thursday evening. Same life, really. 

"Why on earth would I be looking at your arse?" Nick asked. 

"It's a great arse," Louis said. "Why wouldn't you be looking?"

"Jesus Christ," Nick said. "You're so fucking annoying, why on earth do I even bother with you?"

"You don't," Louis said, and stared down at his phone until Philippe arrived to ruin their lives. 

~*~

"You want us to what," Louis said, without inflection. 

"I'm not dancing with that," Nick said, pointing at Louis, and Louis did the decent thing and jabbed him in the ankle with his trainer. 

"I am not a _that_," Louis said. 

"You're a pain in the arse, is what," Nick said. 

"Excellent, excellent," Philippe said. "Just the kind of friction we want from the two of you."

Louis was not having any kind of friction with Nicholas fucking Grimshaw, dancing or otherwise. He was also not dancing with a bloke, since Louis was in the midst of concealing a fairly significant sexuality meltdown and didn't think dancing with a guy was going to help him keep it a secret, which was relatively important given that he hadn't actually told anyone yet. 

There was also a rather embarrassing height difference which Louis wasn't entirely certain he was willing to advertise to a larger audience. 

"It's going to be a love story," Philippe went on, and Louis made an odd, high pitched spluttering noise which he'd be more ashamed of if Nick hadn't made the exact same noise, but louder. "I think the two of you will do just fine."

"Um," Louis said, as Nick said, _not in a month of Sundays._

They did, of course, end up saying yes. You didn't really say no to Philippe. 

~*~

"I'm about 1000% not okay with this," Louis said as he trailed miserably into the practice space at 8am on a Sunday, coffee in hand. "On every single level."

Nick was already limbering up, one ankle up on the barre. "Could have brought me one," he said mildly. "Could murder a coffee right now."

"Not in a month of Sundays," Louis said, which is how he tended to reply to Nick now, over and over again until Nick's expression turned murderous. He took a mutinous sip of his coffee and dumped his bag on the bench furthest from Nick's, taking off his coat and slipping off his trainers so that he was barefoot and just in his t-shirt and leggings. He warmed up at the exact opposite end of the barre. "Is that a sweatband?"

"Yep," Nick said, without looking at him. "You're still a dickhead."

"And you're a knob in a sweatband," Louis said, and went on with his warm up. 

~*~

The lifts, as it turned out, weren't the worst bit. They should have been: Louis letting Nick catch him on his hips, lift him up and over his head, his fingertips splayed across his skin, Louis's whole body arching and then reflexing as he wrapped himself around Nick and let him bend his weight down. 

They fought, and they argued, and they kept on doing the lifts until Louis was so mad with frustration that he stopped worrying about getting hard and started worrying about how to get to the end of this practice and every practice without killing Nick right there and then in the rehearsal room. 

But then he learnt the length of Nick's fingers against his own, the heave of his breath, the smell of his sweat. He learnt how to measure their height difference in jumps and leaps and lifts and stretches as Philippe choreographed around them, as he fixed their positions and lengthened their line and grumbled at them about their core. 

He pressed his forehead to Nick's back, touched his hands to Nick's chest, let Nick lift him and hold him and hold him and lift him, and did the same back, Nick pressed to his skin and Louis holding him up. 

He learnt it all, and the worst bit wasn't the lifts or the choreography or the acting. 

It was the fact that he wasn't acting at all. 

~*~

"How's it going?" his mum asked, as he called her on yet another interminable bus journey back to his flat. "How's the dance?"

"Difficult," Louis said. 

"And Nick?"

"Difficult," Louis said. 

"Louis."

Louis blew out his breath into a little circle of condensation on the bus window. "It should feel like acting," he said finally. "But it feels like it's not."

There's a pause. Another breath. "Which part?"

"The part where I love him," Louis said, and the world changed a little, but not much, because things were just the same as they had been that morning, and the morning before, and the morning before that. 

"Does he know?" His mum asked. 

"Probably," Louis said. "You did, didn't you?"

"Kind of," she said. "I thought maybe."

"I thought maybe too," Louis said. "But now I know."

"Yes," she said. "Now you do."

~*~

They recorded the final rehearsals in a church hall near to Philippe's flat. There was a small crew, two or three cameras, Philippe, a director who took the choreography decisions from Philippe but overrode him for the lighting ones. 

Louis leaned on the barre, his legs bare beneath his shorts. His t-shirt was scoop necked and a little ragged; he probably wouldn't be wearing it for the final production, when they did it on stage at the weekend. Nick came over and leaned his elbows on the barre next to him. His thighs were tattooed. Normally he practiced in leggings so it was the first time Louis had seen them. 

"All right?" Nick asked. 

"Yeah," Louis said, because he wasn't. "You?"

Nick nodded. "Nervous, I suppose."

"Don't be," Louis said. "You're good."

"So are you," Nick said. There was a pause. "I'm glad we did it, you know. This."

Louis glanced at him. "Yeah," he said. "Me too."

~*~

A single cellist accompanied them that first time they danced it in on stage. He played _Hallelujah_ for them as they danced, as Nick lifted him and Louis felt like he was, just this once, able to put every last bit of himself into throwing himself across the stage, into Nick's arms and out again, the push and the pull of his feelings as Nick caught him time and time again. 

Nick's hands against his skin felt like they were honouring him, like he was loved, like the world was born anew because they could dance like this, on stage, together. It felt like a reckless awakening, a powerful clamouring of his heart that Nick had to hear, that pressed between them as they did the lifts they'd practiced for so long, Nick's breath hard against his. 

And then it was over, the music over, the dance over, and they stared at each other as people started to clap. 

Louis longed to say it out loud, that he'd been as honest in their dance as he ever had in his life, but he couldn't. 

Off stage, Philippe said it was the best dancing Louis had ever done. 

It wasn't, Louis thought. It was just true. For once, it was true. 

~*~

"Louis," Nick said, later. He was dressed. 

"Hi," Louis said. He leaned forward on the bench so that he could rest his chin on the barre. 

"You're not dressed."

"No," Louis said. He turned his face so that he was resting his cheek on the barre instead of his chin, so he could look up and see Nick's face. "You know, don't you?"

"Know what?"

"Don't give me that," Louis said. "I'm not that good an actor. You said it yourself."

"Eh," Nick said. "You don't want to listen to what I say. I'm an idiot." There was a pause. "Fell in love with my dance partner, didn't I? There. Proper idiot."

Louis closed his eyes. "A reckless awakening," he said finally. "You know I love you back, don't you?"

"I was hoping so," Nick said. "I was hoping it wasn't just the dancing."

"It wasn't," Louis said. "The dancing came after."

"A reckless awakening," Nick said. Then, "We could have a drink. If you wanted."

"Yeah," Louis said. "I reckon that would be nice."

~*~

They filmed it again, this time in a church on the south coast on a day where the sun streamed in the windows and the world was full of light. 

The same cellist played. 

At the end this time, when it was done, when they were staring, breathless, at each other as the music stilled, Louis kissed him, and Nick kissed back.

**Author's Note:**

> [Rebloggable tumblr post](https://magicalrocketships.tumblr.com/post/187220139598/a-reckless-hallelujah-by-sunsetmog-nicklouis)


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